"There's a myriad of new ingredients available to us these days," says Charles Chick Marshallll, chairman of Distinguished Restaurants of North America (DiRoNA), the New York-based trade organization.
He has distinguished his restaurant from others by sticking to tradition, offering the specific cuisine of his native Mexican state of Oaxaca.
At Centolire on Madison Avenue, Nora Jimenez, the general manager, said tableside service helps distinguish her restaurant from the hundreds of other Italian restaurants in Manhattan.
JOHN DORY Straightforward seafood, suggestive of how it's done in London at places like J. Sheekey and Wiltons, will distinguish this restaurant, owned by the team from the Spotted Pig, the celebrated Greenwich Village gastropub.
And it is the fish dishes more than anything else that distinguish the restaurant (although Tim Zagat, the guidebook maven, liked Mr. Stitt's Niman Ranch carpaccio with Parmesan and horseradish sauce so much that he said it reminded him of an old Bob and Ray line: "It's so good my tongue is making love to the roof of my mouth").
The partners, China Grill Management R.I.A. L.L.C. and China Grill Management 12 East 22 L.L.C., had claimed in their suit that Mr. DiSpirito failed to provide food and service of sufficient quality to distinguish the restaurant and make it a success.
In another scene, visitors to a chic new restaurant, distinguished by its postindustrial design, sit inside a "glassed-in dining room, suspended in a blue Cherenkov glow".
What once distinguished them from restaurants elsewhere was an idea of classlessness: that the person with the grease-stained notepad and aching feet could, with luck and effort, become the person at the table; that there was no essential difference between them.
You are! You'll find In-N-Outs dotting the Western landscape, oases of burgers and fries housed in standalone restaurants distinguished by their trademark golden arrow signs.
Its neighbors are a polyglot assortment of restaurants, none distinguished: Nyonya, serving Malaysian food; the Korea Palace; and the Hofbrauhaus, an outpost of Teutonic gastronomy.
